An open future for higher education (Article Review)

McAndrew, P., Scanlon, E. and Clow, D. (2010) ‘An open future for higher education’ [online], EDUCAUSE Review Online, (EQ) 33/1, http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/open-future-higher-education (last accessed 31 Jan 2014).

In addition to using my blog for this module I also use Diigo for storing articles and my annotations of those articles. In this post I am just providing an overall summary of my thoughts on the paper but you can see my annotations by visiting

https://groups.diigo.com/group/udol2011

What did I think about ‘An open future for higher education’? On the whole the paper presented some interesting ideas. I began by really trying to define innovation and I came up with this visual to refer to and assessed Openlearn in relation to this model

Image 1: What does innovation look like? Shaw 2014 (click to enlarge image)

What I found was that in terms of devices Open learn was innovative in the following ways –

by templating Moodle so that the site had a consistent feel that is unique to the Open University,

by providing accessibility tools to enable those who have difficulties to better access the content (some tools but not the full range offered to paying students)

by adding a whole range of social and interactive functions such as comments, social learn (links to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+, forums and a choice of free and open access blogs,

By offering ease of navigation, tagging and a rating system for pages.

In relation to processes, I am assuming that content undergoes a review process before it is uploaded and the site provides a getting started section with some (limited) monitoring and an opportunity to ask basic FAQ questions (not subject specific). Interestingly, Labspace the Higher Education free OER content is moving to Openlearn in the spring.

In the article the author says that students are able to customise their learning agenda, the ‘user gains the ability to personalize educational resources in the widest sense’. I am not sure I entirely agree with this. The content author has the ability to select what they think is the most appropriate content, I wouldn’t say that the user (student) has the opportunity to ‘personalize educational resources’. In open environments like Openlearn the users do have more choice of communication tools however, which are still limited by their own abilities to use them, so not in the ‘widest sense.’ In both open and closed environments  I still think that the ability to personalise ‘educational resources in the widest sense’ is controlled by the content author.

Finally, Openlearn like all OER’s and MOOC’s challenge the very business model of Higher Education. From my perspective there is a dichotomy – on the one hand why wouldn’t you want to provide Higher Education on a mass scale to those that can’t afford it but have the ambition to succeed, on the other hand Higher Education is a business with employees, budgets and financial targets. What I think worries people about free Higher Education is, what happens if you take the argument to the extreme and provide masses of free Higher Education courses? What happens to the business, to the value of expert knowledge and ultimately to peoples jobs? Of course you will still need experts to write the content and there is still a need for some facilitation of the content but the ratio of teacher to students becomes a lot less, and will we really need as much building space if the offering is mainly online?